Germany contributed heavily to the World Wildlife Fund's "Dirty Thirty" list of most-polluting power stations in the European Union, landing six of its coal-fired plants in the top ten.

According to the latest survey by environmental group WWF, the only country with dirtier power plants than Germany was Greece.

Germany had six coal-burning plants among the top-ten most polluting sites in the European Union, the WWF survey showed. And it was tied with Britain for having the largest number of dirty electricity plants overall. Each country contributed ten plants to the total.

Overall, the WWF said, the Dirty Thirty in seven countries pumped out nearly 400 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006. That's 10 per cent of all EU CO2 emissions.

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Cheering crowds met French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy at his first official engagement on Thursday, hours after police in Paris faced rioters chanting "Sarkozy fascist."

Sarkozy does not take over from President Jacques Chirac until May 16 but there have been clear signs the right-winger's promise of change in areas ranging from labor law to education policy will face significant opposition.

"Mr. Sarkozy has been elected. But I don't think that you can consider that there is a general agreement over his program or that he has the legitimacy to do just anything," Bernard Thibault, secretary general of the main CGT union, told Le Monde.

After winning the election runoff against Socialist Segolene Royal on Sunday, Sarkozy left for a two-day retreat near Malta aboard the luxury yacht of a billionaire friend, provoking ridicule and anger among opposition parties. (Watch Sarkozy's vacation make waves in French newspapers )

He returned to Paris overnight looking suntanned and relaxed, and appeared alongside Chirac on Thursday at a ceremony in central Paris to commemorate the victims of slavery. Sarkozy waved to the crowds but said nothing.

On Wednesday night, hundreds of police had faced off against rioters chanting "Sarkozy fascist, the people will have your hide!" just around the corner from where Thursday's ceremony took place.

Nuclear energy fuels hot debate among MEPs -  EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - MEPs have called on EU leaders to review the union's atomic treaty, Euratom, with many claiming the European Parliament must be given power to oversee the sensitive area, and others hoping to halt what they see as a nuclear renaissance in the bloc.

The moves are being debated as European legislators are set to vote today (10 May) on a report assessing the 50-year-old Euratom treaty, which paved the way to European nuclear cooperation.

The draft report, prepared by Lithuanian MEP Eugenijus Maldeikis from the rightist UEN group, calls for "adjustments" to the treaty to "restore the institutional imbalance in favour of parliament, which should be accorded a co-decision power in the nuclear field."

"We face the problem of democratic deficit," Mr Maldeikus said during the parliamentary debate yesterday, but he defended the 1957 legal document. Green MEPs, on the other hand, want to scrap the whole treaty.

According to Austrian green MEP Johannes Voggenhuber, the Euratom treaty is "a futuristic poem, which half of the EU states are not interested in." "The consensus from 1957 is not there anymore", he said.

PARIS: A proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to gather the European, Middle Eastern, and North African countries of the strategic Mediterranean rim into an economic community along the lines of the early European Union has begun making waves even before the president-elect takes office.

The initiative, outlined by Sarkozy in a campaign speech in February, went largely unnoticed until he repeated it in his electoral victory address Sunday evening. Plans are still being drawn up, Sarkozy's aides said Thursday, but even at this early stage the proposal has cascading implications for the region.

Such a union, even if primarily economic, would necessarily involve the member countries in discussions of controversial issues like Turkish membership in the European Union and illegal immigration via North Africa. It would bring Israel and its Arab neighbors into a new assembly that Sarkozy apparently hopes could tackle the intractable problem of Middle East peace.

Initial reactions have ranged from enthusiasm in Spain to cautious approval in Israel to outrage in Turkey, which sees the proposal as a ploy to keep it out of the European Union.

"This cannot be an alternative to Turkish membership in the EU," Egeman Bagis, the chief foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, said in a telephone interview.

Turkey's ruling party rushed a package of major constitutional reforms through parliament on Thursday as it sought to end weeks of political stalemate over the election of a new president.

The amendments were initiated by the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party after it failed twice to get its presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, elected in parliamentary votes as the current law requires.

Rushed through parliament in four days, they envisage a two-round popular vote to elect the president and call for a once-renewable five-year presidential mandate instead of the current single, seven-year term.

The bill, which has to be approved by outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to come into force, also calls for parliamentary elections to be held every four years instead of the current five.

President Sezer has 15 days to decide if he wants to return the bill to parliament for reconsideration. If it is voted without any change for a second time, Sezer has to either sign it in to law or put it on a referendum.

Tony Blair's ill-fated war with Iraq claimed two more victims yesterday when a civil servant and an MP's researcher were convicted of disclosing details of a secret conversation between the Prime Minister and President George Bush.

Last night, MPs, lawyers and civil rights groups described the prosecution as a "farce" and accused the Government of misusing the Official Secrets Act to cover up political embarrassment over the war.

David Keogh, 50, a Cabinet Office communications officer, was today jailed for six months. He passed on an "extremely sensitive memo" to Leo O'Connor, 44, a political researcher who worked for an anti-war Labour MP, Anthony Clarke. O'Connor was today sentenced to three months in jail after an Old Bailey jury found them guilty yesterday of breaching Britain's secrecy laws.

At the centre of the trial was a four-page Downing Street document which recorded discussions about Iraq between Mr Blair and Mr Bush, held in the Oval Office in April 2004 in the run-up to the handover of power to the Iraqi government.

Serbia is to take over the chairmanship of the Council of Europe despite concerns that the country is abandoning attempts at political reform.

The council is Europe's leading body monitoring human rights and justice.

Serbia takes over the council's chairmanship as part of the normal rotation among its member nations.

On Wednesday, a hardline nationalist was elected to the powerful position of speaker of the Serbian parliament.

Serbia will chair the Committee of Ministers and issue a programme of priorities for its six month chairmanship.

But serious concerns have been raised about Serbia's suitability to take on the role.

Unlike the US and many other EU countries, Germany has no statutory minimum wage, and debate has reignited over introducing one. One side says it's about social justice; the other calls it a job killer.

To some, it might seem that the jobs held by those uniformed individuals keeping watch at a company entrance are to be envied. They don't seem to involve much stress and leave a good amount of time for magazine reading. But the envy would likely stop when the pay stub arrived.

Security firm jobs might often be low key, but they usually also involve very low pay. In eastern Germany, security personnel can receive hourly wages as low as 3.70 euros ($5.02).

That kind of pay is what Michael Sommer, the head of Germany's DGB trade union federation, referred to when he addressed trade unionists on May 1 and talked about millions of German workers  in the restaurant and hotel industry among others eking out a living on "starvation wages." He demanded that Germany introduce a statutory minimum wage of 7.50 euros ($10) per hour.

[...]

Traditionally, wages in Germany are set according to industry-wide collective bargaining agreements and detailed rules determine what kind of work receives what kind of pay. Because of the strength of trade unions in Germany, wage settlements were generally pretty favorable to workers.

[...]

"That has acted as a kind of virtual minimum wage," said Joachim Ragnatz, an economist at the Halle Institute for Economic Research.

But more and more holes have developed in that system. Welfare benefits have been cut back. Unions have lost clout and some sectors, especially in the service industry, have opted out of collective bargaining agreements.

This is probably the best thumbnail description of this issue that you could ever hope to find.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

It correlates with the IGS (police's polices) arresting the cop responsible with breaking the story of RG's inquiry on Segolène's advisor Bruno Rebelle :
Sarkozy is going back at those that hurt him during the campaign.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères